IBM, Sun Microsystems, PGP, Red Hat and other firms have formed a standards working group in the OASIS organization to develop a new Key Management Interoperability Protocol (KMIP) for encryption key management.

The KMIP Trusted Computing (TC) Group is in the planning phase for a protocol whereby various e-mail, databases and storage systems have a common encrypted communication basis. Next to IBM, Sun, Red Hat and PGP, the technical committee includes Hewlett-Packard, Cisco and EMC, along with other smaller enterprises.

Up to a short time ago, Sun and IBM/HP were not seeing eye to eye as far as a common crypto standard was concerned. Now it looks like Sun is on board the KMIP group. A 22-page white paper that details the technical aspects of the protocol is linked from the OASIS KMIP TC website.

OASIS stands for Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards and is a not-for-profit consortium of about 5,000 members from over 600 organizations. Members pay annual dues ranging from $1,000 to $50,000 based on their organizational size, type and participation level. Members of the KMIP committee serve as sponsors for active collaboration toward developing new, open standards and pay annual dues ranging from $10,000 to $16,000.

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